CAMARILLO : Trustees Delay Vote on School Changes

Pleasant Valley Elementary School District trustees have postponed voting on a plan to ease overcrowding that would have changed the starting times of the district’s 13 schools.

Instead, trustees voted to allow intermediate schools to begin scheduling for next school year, but decided to discuss transportation issues that will affect students districtwide at a future meeting when long-range plans become clearer.

After 2 1/2 hours of debate, the board deadlocked twice Thursday in votes on the plan, with Trustees Leonard Diamond and Delores Rains voting in favor, and Trustees Leonard Caligiuri and Jan McDonald voting in opposition both times. Trustee Ricardo Amador was absent.

A third vote came after Special Education Coordinator Cathy Cartwright and other administrators pleaded with the trustees to make a decision because they needed to know which students will be enrolled at which schools.

That vote, in response to Cartwright’s request, passed 3-1, with McDonald as the sole dissenter.

The district has projected an overflow of 150 kindergarten through eighth-grade students from eastern Camarillo next school year. The plan to change the starting times districtwide would allow some students that would normally go to Monte Vista Intermediate School to go to Los Altos Intermediate School.

The motion called for no money to be spent on two new buses or two new portable classrooms, an earlier proposal to handle the overflow that would have cost $66,000.